Questions Without Notice from the Party Leaders

Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 1:55 pm on 22 March 2022.

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Photo of Adam Price Adam Price Plaid Cymru 1:55, 22 March 2022

On the same weekend as our anti-racism rally, South Wales Police, supported by the police and crime commissioner, decided it was an appropriate time to restart in the city centre the use of facial recognition technology that it had been forced to halt by the Court of Appeal because of concerns over its inbuilt racial bias. According to the UK Government's own biometrics and forensics ethics group, the lack of representation of ethnic minority faces in the training data on which the technology used by the police is based means it is more likely to identify innocent black people as criminals. This will exacerbate the racial disproportionality in rates of detention that you, yourself, have acknowledged. In Scotland, the use of this technology is banned for this reason. We lack the power to do so currently in Wales, but will you at least support the prohibition of its use on publicly owned land like the Senedd steps, where the rally was held on Sunday?